Herman Wouk - War and Remembrance

by War

  Hitler's numbered directives end With Number 51, dated late in 1943; but in fact, after this fatal Number 45, they trail off in defensive measures. This was his final wielding of the initiative.

  Lack of experience, and the strain of arrogating to himself all the political and military authority of Germany, had told at last on a high-strung temperament, a very adept mind, and a fearsome will. The order was madness. Yet only in our innermost HQ councils was the picture dear in all its folly. The Wehrmacht obeyed, and marched off into the remotest depths of southern Russia on two separate roads to its sombre fate.

  Arrival at Stalingrad

  With awesome inevitability, the tragedy now began to unfold.

  The Caucasus Force performed wonders, marching across vast steppes blazing with midsummer heat, climbing to the peaks of snowcapped mountain ranges, investing the Black Sea coast, and actually sending patrols as far as the Caspian Sea. But it fell short of its objectives. What Hitler had ordered was beyond its manpower, its firepower, and its logistical support. The force stood still for as much as ten days at a time, for want of gasoline, and of supply trucks to bring up the fuel. At one point, with true Greek irony, gasoline was even being brought to the Caucasus Force on the backs of cameisl List's great armies stalled in the mountains, harried by elusive tough Red units, and unable to advance.

  Meanwhile, on August 23 the Volga Force, driving on toward Stalingrad, reached the riverbank horth of the city' and the neutralization phase began with heavy air and artillery bombardment.

  Resistance was at first meager For a day or two it looked as though Stalingrad might iall to a coup de main. But it did not happen. we were at a far stretch ourselves, and Stalingrad held against the first shock.

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE These dry words of Roon scarcely convey the reality as the Russians saw it.

  The advance of the Sixth Army on Stalingrad was apparently the most terrifying event of what the Russians call the Great Patriotic War The army commanders, the populace, and Stalin himself were astounded at this renewed powerful thrust of the Germans into the vitals of their country. The August twenty-third bombardment was one of the most horrible ordeals by fire the Russians ever endured. Some forty thousand civilians were killed The flaming streets Of the town literally "ran with blood." All communication with Moscow was cut off.

  For several hours Josef Stalin believed that Stalingrad had fallen.

  But though the city was to undergo one of the worst punishments in the history of warfare thereafter, that was the low point.

  ,Most military writers conclude that if Hitler had not interfered with the Blue plan, the Volga Force would have reached the river weeks earlier, while Stalin was still under the delusion that the southern attack was a feint Stalingrad would have fallen, a fruit of the massive initial surprise, and the whole war might have gone differently.

  Hitter disembowelled the Blue campaign by the diversion to Rostov.

  V.H.

  Catastrophe at-Stalengrad

  As previously stated, the capture of Stalingrad was not a military necessity.

  Our aim was to take the land bridge between the rivers, and to deny the Soviets the use of the Volga as a supply route. Now we were at the Volga. All we had to do was invest the city and bombard it to rubble. After all, we invested Leningrad flor more than two years.

  About a million Russians fell in Leningrad streets from starvation, and for all intents and purposes of the war, the city was a withered corpse. There was no military reason not to treat Stalingrad the same way.

  But there was increasing political reason. For as the Caucasus Force came to a halt in the wild mountain passes despite all Hitler's savage urging; as Rommel stalled at El Alamein, failed in two assaults, and at last underwent the grinding assault of the British; as the R.A.F increased its barbaric fire raids on our cities, slaughtering thousands of innocent women and children and pulverizing important factories; as our U-boat losses suddenly and alarmingly shot up; as the Americans landed in North Africa with world-shaking political effect; as all these chickens came home to roost, and Adolf Hitler's great summer flush of triumph waned, and the first cracks in his gigantic imperium appeared, the embattled Fuhrer felt a more and more desperate need for a prestige victory to turn all this around.

  STALENGRAD! STALINGRAD, bearing-the name of his strongest foe!

  STALINGRAD, symbol of the Bolshevism he had fought all his life!

  STALINGRAD, a city appearing more and more in world headlines as a pivot of the war!

  The capture of Stalingrad became for Adolf Hitler an unbelievably violent obsession. His orders in the ensuing weeks were madness compounded and recompounded. The Sixth Army, which with its mobile striking power had won an unbroken string of victories in Poland, France, and Russia, was fed division by division into the meat grinder of Stalingrad's ruined streets where mobile tactics were impossible.

  Slav snipers mowed down the veterans of the great Sixth in a house-to-house "rat war."

  The Russian General Staff poured in defenders across the Volga to keep up this annihilation, while methodically preparing a stupendous counterstroke against the weak satellite armies on the Don flank. For Josef Stalin had finally grasped that Hitler, with his obsessive cramming -of his finest divisions into the Moloch-maw of Stalingrad, was giving him a glorious opportunity.

  Late in November the blow fell. The Red Army hurtled across the Don into the Rumanian army, guarding the flank of the Volga Force, northwest of Stalingrad. These unwarlike auxiliaries gave way like cheese to a knife. A similar attack routed the Rumanian flank corps in our Fourth Panzer Army, on the southern flank. As the attack developed into December, the Russians smashed into our lines all along the Don where ftallans and Hungarians were protecting the Sixth Army's rear; and a steel trap closed on three hundred thousand German soldiers, the flower of the Wehrmacht.

  ...

  (From "Hitler as Military Leader") Transformation of Hits... As it happened, I was away from Supreme Headquarters during much of this trying period, on a long inspection tour When I left late in August, all was going well enough in Russia.

  Both forces were advancing rapidly on their diverging fronts; the Red Army still seemed to be fading away, taking no advantage of the great gap opening up in our line; and Hitler, though understandably tense and nervous, and suffering dreadfully from the heat, seemed in good spirits.

  I returned to find a shocking change at Werewolf. Balder was gone, fired. Nobody had relieved him. General List of the Caucasus Force had been fired. Nobody had relieved him, either.

  Hitler had assumed both postal Adolf Hitler was now not only head of the German State, head of the Nazi Party, and,Supreme Commander of the armed forces; he was now his own Army Chief of Staff. and he was in direct command of the Caucasus Force, stymied six hundred miles away in the mountains. And this was not a nightmare; it was all really happening.

  Hitler was not speaking to Jodl, his erstwhile pet and confidant.

  He was not speaking to anybody. He was taking his meals alone, spending most of his time in a darkened room, brooding.

  At his formal meetings with the staff, secretaries came and went in relays, writing down every word; and it was with these secretaries and nobody else that Hitler was conversing. The break with the army. was complete.

  Gradually I pieced together what had happened. Halder's objections to Hitler's senseless pressing of the Stalingrad attack had at last resulted in his summary dismissal in September;,and so the last level head among us, the one senior staff officer who for years would talk up to Hitler, was gone.

  As for the pliable Jodl, the Fuhrer had sent him by plane to the Caucasus Force, to urge General List to resume the advance at all cost.

  But Jodl had come back and, for once in his life, had told Hitler the truth-that List could not advance until logistics improved. Hitler had turned nasty; Jodl, in an amazing burst of spirit, had rounded on his master, reeling off all Hitler's orders which had led to this impasse.


  The two men had ended screeching at each other like washerwomen, and thereafter Jodl had been barred from the great man's presence. it was several days before I was summoned to appear at a briefing. I was quite prepared, even at the cost of my head, to give my report on the bad state of Rommel's supply. As it happened, Hitler did not call on me to speak. But I will never forget the glance he fixed on me when I first entered the room.

  Gray-faced, red-eyed, slumped in his chair with his head sunk between his shoulders, holding one trembling hand with the other, he was searching my face for the nature of my news, for a ray of optimism or hope. What he saw displeased him. He gave me a menacing glare, uncovering his teeth, and turned away. I was looking at a cornered animal. I realized that he knew in his heart that he had botched the Blue campaign, thrown away Germany's last chance, and lost the war; and that from all quarters otthe globe, the hangmen were approaching with the rope.

  But it was not in his nature to admit mistakes. Alt we heard, in the dreadful weeks that dragged on until the Sixth Army surrendered-and indeed until he shot himself in the bunker in 1945 -was how we generals had failed him; how emk's delay at Voronezh had lost Stalingrad; how incompetent List was; how battle nerves had incapacitated Rommel; and so on without end.

  Even when the Stalingrad Pocket, cut to pieces, began surrendering piecemeal, all he could think of was to promote pautus to Field Marshal; and when Paulus failed to kill himself rather than surrender, he threw one of his worst fits of rage. That ninety thousand of his best soldiers were going into captivity; that more than two hundred thousand more had been hideously lost for his sake; all that meant nothing to the man. Paulus had failed to show proper gratitude for promotion, by blowing his brains out.

  That upset Hitler.

  (From World Holocaust)

  Post Mortem Hitler would never allow the sixth Army its one chance, which was to fight its way out to the west; either early in the entrapment, when it might have broken out by itself, or in December, when Manstein at the head of the newly formed Don Force battled his way through the snow to within thirty-five miles of a join-up. Not once would he give Paulus permission to break out. The screeching refrain that echoed through Headquarters until Paulus surrendered was, "I won't leave the Volga!" He kept prating of "Fortress Stalingrad," but there was no "fortress," only a surrounded and shrinking army. He boasted in a national broadcast, late in October, that he had actually captured Stalingrad, and was reducing pockets of resistance at leisure because "he did not want another Verdun," and time was of no consequence. Thus he burned his public bridges, condemning the Sixth Army to stand and die.

  Some military analysts now lay the disaster to Goring, who promised to supply the trapped Sixth Army at a rate of seven hundred tons of supplies a day. The Luftwaffe effort never reached two hundred tons, and Goring blamed the bad weathers Of course Goering's promise was just a jig to his master's tune.

  They were old comrades-in-arms. He knew what Hitler wanted him to say, so he said it, and condemned large numbers of Luftwaffe pilots to useless deaths. Hitler never reproached Goring for this. He wanted to stay at the Volga until tragedy befell, and Goering's transparent lie helped him to do it.

  Jodl testified at Nuremberg that as early as November Hitler privately admitted to him that the Sixth Army was done for; still it had to be sacrificed to protect the retreat of the armies in the Caucasus. What balderdashl A fighting retreat from Stalingrad would have made far more sense. But the propagandist in Hitler sensed that a heartrending drama of a lost army might rally the people to him, whereas an ignominious swallowing of his boasts with a retreat would sully his prestige. On some such reasoning, he sacrificed a superb striking arm of battle-hardened veterans which could never be replaced.

  Roosevelt Triumphant Franklin Roosevelt's proclamation at this time of the slogan "Unconditional Surrender," at the Casablanca conference in January, was in every way a masterstroke. Critics of the slogan including the august General Eisenhower-fail to understand what Roosevelt accomplished with this thunderous Stroke; which, with his usual guile, he passed off as a Casual remark at a press conference.

  In the first place, he drove home to the entire world, and above all to the German people, the fundamental fact that we were now losing the war. The entire Global Waterloo turnabout was crystallized in those two simple words. This was in fact a stunning propaganda success.

  Secondly, he publicly signalled to Stalin an Anglo-American pledge against a negotiated peace in the west. No doubt Stalin remained skeptical, but it was as loud and powerful a commitment as Rooscivelt could give him.

  Third, Roosevelt reassured the wavering nations like Turkey and Spain, and the subject peoples all over Europe, and the ever-veering Arabs, that the Western powers would not relax at the turn of the tide in Russia,-and allow Bolshevism to sweep the continent and the Middle East.

  Fourth, he gave his own spoiled and soft nation, in its first moment Of success against us, a clear and simple war aim, which appealed to its naive psychology, and discouraged notions of a short war or a compromise peace. it is objected that the German people were stiffened to resist to the last under Hitler's leadership; that Roosevelt should have apoealed over his head to them and to the army to topple the Nazi regime and Make an honorable peace. This objection shows fatuous ignorance of what the Third Reith really was.

  Hitler had made Germany over in the only form he ever wanted; a system of headless structures, including the army, with all Power. concentrated in himself. There was nobody to topple the Nazis.

  There was nobody to appeal tID. Our national destiny was bound up with this man. This had been the one aim of all his actions since attaining power, and this he achieved.

  He was Germany. The armed forces were pledged to him with their sacred honor. The assassination attempt that failed in July 19" was witless and traitorous. I took no part in it, and I have never regretted that decision. it should have been plain to every general, as it was to me, that to order men to die in the field for a Leader, and then to murder this same Leader (however unsatisfactory he might be) was a betrayal of principle.

  More than once, at bad moments in Headquarters, I thought of how relatively easy it would be for one of us to shoot Hitler.

  But he knew he could rely on two pillars in the German character: Honor and Duty.

  The German people were in a tragic trap of history, condemned to fight for two and a half more fearful years, simply to keep alive the Head of State who had led them to destruction.

  Too late did we learn the fatal mistake of the Fuhrerprinzip. A monarch can sue for peace and preserve his nation's honor and stability in defeat, as the Japanese emperor did. A dictator who fails in war is only a beleaguered usurper, who must fight on to the last like Shakespeare's Macbeth, wading ever deeper in blood.

  Hitler could not step down; and none of the Nazis could step down.

  Their secret massacres of the Jews had rendered that impossible.

  "Unconditional Surrender" made not the slightest difference either to them or to the German people. Nothing could now sunder Hitler and the Germans, and put an end to the war, but Gdtterddmtmrung.

  TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: General von Roon's operational sketch of the fate of the Caucasus Force, which follows the Stalingrad account he calls "Fpk Anabasis of Army Group A." It is the longest essay in World Holocaust. I do not believe the American reader would be as interested in it as Roon's German readers are.

  Essentially, once Paulus's army surrendered at Stalingrad, the Caucasus Force faced a complete cutoff of their line of retreat After considerable dithering, Hitler put the very able General von Manstein in charge of the northern and most threatened of these luckless armies, to pull him out of the mess. This Manstein did, with some brilliant maneuvering under the worst winter conditions. Another general Kleist, /ed the retreat of the southern forces to a bridgehead on the Black Sea.

  In the end the Caucasus Force got out in good order, inflicting strong blows on the Red Army as it retreated
, and the Germans found themselves more or less back on the jumping-off line of Case Blue. It was a stupendously futile military exercise, thanks to Germany's supreme "intuitive" genius who ordered it and then messed it up.

  A bitter name for the campaign gained currency in the Wehrmacht: "the Caucasus round trip."

  I had Occasion to meet Hitler, so I know how plausible and even amiable he could be, like a gangster boss, he had all the forcefulness and cunning of a master criminal But that is not greatness in my book.

  Hitler's early "successes" were only the startling depredations of a resolute felon become a head of state and turned loose with the Power of a great nation to back him UP.

  Why the Germans committed themselves to him remains a historical puzzle. They knew what they were getting. He had spelled it all out in advance, in Mein Kampf. He and his National Socialist cohorts were from the start a gang of recognizable and very dangerous thugs, but the Germans by and large adored and believed in these monsters right up to the rude Stalingrad awakening, and even long afterward. v.H.